{"id":119484,"date":"2026-10-27T06:10:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=119484"},"modified":"2026-10-27T06:10:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T10:10:07","slug":"honey-bees-bullying-other-bees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/honey-bees-bullying-other-bees\/","title":{"rendered":"Honey Bees Bullying Other Bees: Wild Pollinators Back Away"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>12 Minute, 0 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>If you have ever stuck a &#8220;save the bees&#8221; sticker on a car window, or shaken a sachet of wildflower seeds onto a bare patch of soil, there is a good chance you pictured one particular bee while you did it. Round. Golden. Stripy. The one on the honey jar.<\/p>\n\n<p>Britain has about 270 species of bee, according to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. Exactly one of them makes honey.<\/p>\n\n<p>That gap is why a new study out of Cambridge reads so strangely. Researchers spent 93 hours watching flowers, and a lot of what they recorded was honey bees bullying other bees off them. Barging in. Chasing. Not sharing.<\/p>\n\n<p>The bee that a decade of public campaigning taught us to rescue turns out to be the one winning the fight.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What 93 Hours of Watching Flowers Actually Showed<\/h2>\n\n<p>The study came out of Anglia Ruskin University&#8217;s Applied Ecology Research Group, led by PhD student Victoria Buckle, and was published in the journal <em>Ecological Entomology<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n<p>The method was patient rather than clever. Over two years, the team watched flowers at five sites in and around Cambridge, all of them within 300 metres of a known honeybee colony. They picked two plants: bramble, the thing that grows through every neglected fence in the country, and ivy, which flowers late when almost nothing else does. Then they sorted the visitors into five groups and scored every encounter between insects as a win, a loss, or a share.<\/p>\n\n<p>Here is what came out of it.<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Other pollinators actively avoided honeybees in 28% of interactions on bramble, and 36% on ivy.<\/li>\n<li>When honeybees won an encounter, they had physically displaced or chased the other insect in at least one in five of those wins \u2014 on both plants.<\/li>\n<li>On bramble, a doubling of honeybee density was associated with a 14% reduction in the number of bumblebees.<\/li>\n<li>On ivy, more honeybees meant fewer solitary bees and fewer hoverflies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>The researchers&#8217; summary is blunt: honeybees outcompeted all other wild pollinators.<\/p>\n\n<p>Worth being precise about that word &#8220;associated&#8221;. The study watched; it did not run an experiment on those five sites. It can show that where there were more honeybees there were fewer bumblebees. It cannot, on its own, prove the first caused the second.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>The One Wild Bee That Fights Back \u2014 and It Only Arrived in 2001<\/h2>\n\n<p>This is the detail that stayed with me, and it is the one almost nobody has repeated.<\/p>\n\n<p>Out of everything visiting those flowers, exactly one species held its ground. The ivy bee. It contested encounters with honeybees instead of backing off, and it won contests against them more often than it lost. It displaced and chased honeybees, rather than the other way round. The authors say it is the first time, to their knowledge, that such behaviour has been observed.<\/p>\n\n<p>The ivy bee is a solitary bee. It is also not native to Britain. It was first recorded here in 2001.<\/p>\n\n<p>So the wild bee that can actually hold a flower against a honeybee is one that nobody campaigned for, one that most people have never heard of, and one that was not even in the country a generation ago. It arrived on its own. Nobody built it a box.<\/p>\n\n<p>There is something uncomfortable in that. We are quite good at noticing insects once we have decided they are useful, and quite bad at noticing them otherwise \u2014 the same blind spot that made the <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/where-have-all-the-wasps-gone\/\">sudden quiet of Britain&#8217;s wasps<\/a> take most of us completely by surprise.<\/p>\n\n<h2>An Island Where They Shut the Hives<\/h2>\n\n<p>Watching flowers tells you who wins. It does not tell you what would happen if the winner simply were not there. For that you need to take the honeybees away, which is hard to do anywhere that has roads.<\/p>\n\n<p>Giannutri is a small protected Italian island, about 2.6 square kilometres, with an apiary of 18 hives that were introduced in 2018. A team led by Lorenzo Pasquali did something you can only do in a place like that: on selected days during the peak of wild bee foraging, they shut the hives. Not forever. Eleven hours a day.<\/p>\n\n<p>In the plants the pollinators visited most, those short closures raised nectar volume by around 60% and pollen availability by around 30%. The flowers were not empty. They were just being emptied.<\/p>\n\n<p>With the honeybees shut in, two wild bees \u2014 a species of <em>Anthophora<\/em> and the buff-tailed bumblebee \u2014 moved to the centre of the island&#8217;s visitation network and fed harder while they had the chance.<\/p>\n\n<p>The part the team published alongside that is harder reading. Monitoring the same transects across four years, they recorded what the paper itself calls an alarming decline of around 80% in both of those species. The authors are careful with it: the pattern is consistent with honeybees monopolising the flowers, but four years of counting on one island does not prove the cause by itself. That work appeared in <em>Current Biology<\/em> in 2025.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Why Honey Bees Bullying Other Bees Is Not the Same as Killing Them<\/h2>\n\n<p>It would be easy to run from here straight to &#8220;honeybees are wiping out wild bees&#8221;. The evidence does not take you that far, and it is worth knowing why.<\/p>\n\n<p>A systematic review published in 2026 in the <em>Journal of Apicultural Research<\/em> by Gratzer, Becker and Brodschneider pooled 83 field studies on exactly this question. Of those, 75 tested whether honeybees and wild bees were competing for the same flowers. All 75 found that they were \u2014 a clean 100%.<\/p>\n\n<p>But only about 18% of the studies measured anything about how the wild bees themselves actually fared: whether they survived, whether they reproduced, whether their numbers fell. Among that small handful, negative effects turned up in somewhere between 12.5% and 30% of them, depending on which outcome you look at. The reviewers&#8217; own conclusion is that while floral overlap is widespread, direct negative effects on wild bee fitness are less common and context-dependent.<\/p>\n\n<p>Read that carefully, because it is two findings, not one. Honeybees reliably win the flower \u2014 that is as close to settled as this field gets. Whether winning the flower harms the loser enough to matter is a separate question, and the measurements that would answer it have mostly never been taken. Nobody has been counting the thing we would most want to know.<\/p>\n\n<p>That shape should feel familiar. A single striking number gets quoted everywhere while the thing it actually measures goes unexamined \u2014 it is the same trap that makes <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/living-planet-report-2026\/\">the famous 73% wildlife figure<\/a> so easy to repeat and so widely misunderstood.<\/p>\n\n<p>The Cambridge researchers themselves were careful to say so. In Buckle&#8217;s words: &#8220;The aim of our study was not to discourage beekeeping.&#8221; What the team does expect is more of this, not less. Competitive encounters rose with temperature, and an earlier study they cite found that a 12\u00b0C rise in temperature led to a ten-fold increase in honeybees leaving their nests. Warming, Buckle says, &#8220;is only likely to further exacerbate interference competition from dominant honeybees&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Nobody Put on the Sticker<\/h2>\n\n<p>Here is the thing that makes this story more than an insect story.<\/p>\n\n<p>&#8220;Save the bees&#8221; worked. Anglia Ruskin&#8217;s own write-up notes that the number of registered beekeepers in Britain rose from 19,000 in 2010 to 47,000 last year. That is a public campaign doing exactly what public campaigns are supposed to do.<\/p>\n\n<p>It just did it for the bee with a product attached.<\/p>\n\n<p>Nobody was lying. The honeybee is simply the bee we can picture, the bee we can keep, the bee that <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-and-science\/how-bees-decide-their-job\/\">divides up its work<\/a> in a way we find charming, and the bee that hands us something back in a jar. The other 269 species do the same work and give us nothing we can hold. So when we were told to help, we helped in the direction where help was legible.<\/p>\n\n<p>One of the oldest stories anyone tells about people and a garden gives the human job two words, and both of them are worth sitting with. The first means to work it, to serve it, to put your labour under it. The second means to keep it \u2014 and underneath that, to hedge it about, to guard it, to watch over it. Neither one means to curate it around whichever part of it produces something for us. The job, as it was first described, has no yield in it at all. You serve the garden and you stand guard over it, and that is the whole of the brief.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which is a strange thing to find at the bottom of a study about bees barging each other off a bramble flower. It turns out the hard part of looking after something was never the looking after. It was noticing the parts of it that do not pay.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Actually Helps, and Costs Nothing<\/h2>\n\n<p>The honest answer to this study is not &#8220;stop keeping bees&#8221;. It is that keeping bees and helping wild bees are two different activities, and only one of them needs money.<\/p>\n\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Leave the ivy alone when it flowers.<\/strong> It is the plant in this study for a reason. It blooms in autumn when almost nothing else does, and the bee that can actually stand up to a honeybee depends on it. Cutting ivy back before it flowers removes the last meal of the year.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Let a patch of bramble stay.<\/strong> The other study plant. It grows itself, costs nothing, asks for nothing, and feeds an enormous range of insects.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Leave bare soil and dry stems where you can.<\/strong> Most of Britain&#8217;s bees are solitary. They do not live in hives. They nest in the ground and in hollow stems, so tidiness is the thing that removes their housing.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Notice the ones that are not stripy.<\/strong> Small, dark, fast, unremarkable. That is what most bees look like. You have been walking past them your whole life.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>None of that needs a hive, a subscription, or a single pound. It mostly needs you to do less, in the right places.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Your Turn<\/h2>\n\n<p>Here is the question this study leaves hanging, and it is not really about bees: when a cause gets simplified enough for everyone to join in, is that a fair price for getting millions of people to care \u2014 or does the simplified version quietly become the only version anyone acts on? Tell me which way you land on it in the comments. I genuinely go back and forth.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"6491fb8269\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/6491fb8269\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<p>Found out today that Britain has about 270 species of bee and only one of them makes honey \u2014 and researchers just clocked 93 hours of the honey one chasing the other ones off the flowers. Other pollinators backed away in 28% of encounters on bramble, 36% on ivy. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/honey-bees-bullying-other-bees\/<\/p>\n\n<p>&#8220;Save the bees&#8221; worked. Registered beekeepers in Britain went from 19,000 to 47,000. We just saved the one that out-muscles all the others at the flower. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/honey-bees-bullying-other-bees\/<\/p>\n\n<p>The only wild bee that can hold a flower against a honeybee is the ivy bee \u2014 which arrived in Britain on its own in 2001, that nobody campaigned for, and that most of us have never heard of. Nobody built it a box. https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/nature-and-creation\/honey-bees-bullying-other-bees\/<\/p>\n\n<h2>Questions People Ask<\/h2>\n\n<h3>Are honey bees bullying other bees?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Yes, in the specific sense that they compete aggressively for flowers and usually win. A two-year study from Anglia Ruskin University, published in Ecological Entomology, watched flower visitors for 93 hours at five sites near Cambridge. Other pollinators actively avoided honeybees in 28% of interactions on bramble and 36% on ivy, and when honeybees won an encounter they had physically displaced or chased their rival in at least one in five of those wins. The researchers reported that honeybees outcompeted all other wild pollinators observed.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Do honey bees harm wild bee populations?<\/h3>\n\n<p>That is genuinely unresolved. A 2026 systematic review in the Journal of Apicultural Research pooled 83 field studies: all 75 that tested for competition over flowers found it, but only about 18% measured whether wild bees actually survived or reproduced less as a result, and negative effects appeared in roughly 12.5% to 30% of that small group. The reviewers concluded that floral overlap is widespread while direct negative effects on wild bee fitness are less common and context-dependent. A 2025 Current Biology study on the Italian island of Giannutri did record an alarming decline of about 80% in two wild bee species over four years, which the authors describe as consistent with honeybees monopolising the flowers \u2014 but a single island over four years cannot settle the question by itself.<\/p>\n\n<h3>Which bee can beat a honey bee at a flower?<\/h3>\n\n<p>The ivy bee. In the Anglia Ruskin study it was the only species that contested encounters with honeybees rather than backing away, and it won those contests more often than it lost them, displacing and chasing honeybees off flowers. The authors say it is the first time, to their knowledge, that such behaviour has been observed. The ivy bee is a solitary, non-native species that was first recorded in Britain in 2001.<\/p>\n\n<h3>How many kinds of bee are there in Britain?<\/h3>\n\n<p>About 270 species, according to the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, though counts vary slightly between sources. Of those, roughly 250 are solitary bees that nest in the ground or in hollow stems rather than in hives, around two dozen are bumblebees, and exactly one is the honeybee. The honeybee is the only British bee that makes honey and the only one kept by beekeepers.<\/p>\n\n<h3>What actually helps wild bees?<\/h3>\n\n<p>Mostly leaving things alone, which costs nothing. Let ivy flower rather than cutting it back in autumn, since it feeds insects when almost nothing else is in bloom. Leave a patch of bramble standing. Leave some bare soil and dry hollow stems, because most bees are solitary and nest in the ground or in stems rather than in hives, so tidying removes their nesting sites. Keeping a honeybee hive is a separate activity from helping wild bees, and the research on floral competition suggests it is not a substitute for it.<\/p>        <div class=\"booster-block booster-reactions-block\">\n            <div class=\"twp-reactions-icons\">\n                \n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-1\" post-id=\"119484\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/happy.svg\" alt=\"Happy\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Happy                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                                                    <span style=\"display: none;\" class=\"twp-react-count\">0<\/span>\n                        \n                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Here is what 93 hours of watching found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":119485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[3708],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature-and-creation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119486,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119484\/revisions\/119486"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}